What is the Ideal Foot Strike for Runners?

Questions around correct or ideal foot strike is something I get asked about a lot as a coach. Everyone wants to know if there is a correct foot strike. Unfortunately, the answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is there isn't. Moreover, any coach that tells you to change your foot strike without taking the rest of your running style into consideration is someone to run away from, fast!
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Why? Because your foot strike is actually very likely a symptom of your running style, not a cause. This means that if you try to change the foot strike, you are changing something that was actually preventing injury or at least reducing the negative impacts of whatever your body is not doing quite right.

​Questions around correct or ideal foot strike is something every I get asked about a lot as a coach. Everyone wants to know if there is a correct foot strike. Unfortunately, the answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is there isn't. Moreover, any coach that tells you to change your foot strike without taking the rest of your running style into consideration is someone to run away from, fast!

Why? Because your foot strike is actually very likely a symptom of your running style, not a cause. This means that if you try to change the foot strike, you are changing something that was actually preventing injury or at least reducing the negative impacts of whatever your body is not doing quite right.

Our foot strikes are generally due to a combination of tight muscles, weak muscles, inactive muscles, and muscular coordination. For example, a weak gluteus medius (one of the muscles on the sides of the hip) can be contributing to unstable hips, causing our legs to rotate inwards or outwards (depending on what other muscles are doing as well), which would then be informing how the foot is coming down. An inward twist of the thigh would mean pronation, or inward rolling onto the inside of the feet and an outward rotation of the thigh would mean supination. Tight hip flexors (which include the gluetus medius) can lead to hard heel striking. Strengthening, activating, loosening and coordinating the right muscles is the best route here.

So yes, its quite possible that foot strike can be improved. But if it can, it will come as a result of working with the rest of the body. With runners I work with, the foot strike does tend to change naturally to landing lightly on the heels, rolling naturally along the outside of the foot, back onto the forefoot and pushing off finally with the big toe. This is the style of walking that Tai Chi masters believe is best, in part because it is so complete in both working with the structure of the foot and recruiting a wide array of primary and accessory muscles.

Irene Davis, a gait retraining expert at the University of Delaware, believes runners can recreate her study's successful work with runners who have had stress fractures with one simple technique: listening.

Try listening to your own footstrikes and modify your strides to make them quieter. As Russ Tucker and Jonathan Dugas in The Runner's Body explain, quieter strides help activate “the muscles earlier and to a greater degree, which reduces the load on the bone. If you're a heel-striker, modifying your stride so that you land on the midfoot should also reduce impact forces and your injury risk.”

One study analyzed foot strike pattern and gait changes for a 161 kilometer ultramarathon. They found that the runners were primarily heel strikers earlier on, but this actually shifted towards mid and forefront as the race wore on for the top twenty finishers. However, the study did not find a correlation between any particular foot strike and performance.

Jon Davis, in his search for an ideal foot strike found that there doesn't seem to be one. Any shift has its trade offs. The impact force would still be there, just distributed differently.

I would say the take away here is don't worry about it too much. Unless you are having some kind of noticeable pain, in which case find a coach or three to help you!

For related reading, check out how to choose shoes and my take on barefoot running.